Word: physicists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...group's fliers listed several incidents of alleged prejudice against Asian-Americans, including the U.S. government's incarceration of Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese-born nuclear physicist accused of breaching national security while working in Los Alamos Laboratories...
...always thought that another form of lingering undergraduate guilt explained the phenomenal sales some years ago of A Brief History of Time, by the English physicist Stephen Hawking--a book that, I think it's fair to say, is not your typical best-seller-list page turner. I figured that it was being snapped up by liberal-arts types who in their undergraduate days had finessed the science requirement by taking some notorious gut in the geology department and still felt guilty about having blindly accepted the conventional wisdom that physics courses should be avoided at all costs...
...snap shut a fraction of a second after they're created. The only way to keep them open, as far as we know, is with matter that has negative density. In layman's terms, that's stuff that weighs less than nothing. This may sound impossible, but the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir theorized in 1948 that holding two plates of electrically conducting material very close together in a vacuum actually does create a region of negative density that exerts an inward pressure on the plates. The force predicted by Casimir has been verified in the laboratory...
Some argue conservatively that time travelers don't change the past; they were always part of it. On the other hand, paradoxical though this sounds, a version of the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics (see "Will We Discover Another Universe?" in this issue) devised by Oxford physicist David Deutsch might allow such history-changing visits. In this picture, there are many interlacing world histories, so that if you went back in time and killed your grandmother when she was a young girl, this would simply cause space-time to branch off into a new parallel universe that doesn...
Perhaps the most intriguing unknown, however, concerns the cosmic role played by intelligent life itself. As the physicist Freeman Dyson notes, "It is impossible to calculate in detail the long-range future of the universe without including the effects of life and intelligence." Much of the earth has been transformed, for better and worse, by the presence here of an intelligent species capable of manipulating its environment for its own benefit...